Beat Kings: The History of Hip Hop

Beat Kings: The History of Hip Hop
Nature Sounds

In Beat Kings: The History of Hip Hop, Wu-Tang Clan's Mathematics has assembled a revealing documentary from the point of view of the genre's architects. The DVD is an entertaining crash course in the nitty-gritty of hip hop's evolution beyond the platinum records and glitzy videos—from turntables to 808s to ProTools. The interview clips—concisely organized into chapters on history, equipment, influences, and the biz, among other topics—are a who's who of hip-hop production legends. Wu-Tang's RZA jokes about making beats on his first drum machine, a Roland 606 stolen by Ol' Dirty Bastard. Marley Marl—perhaps the king of the beat kings—recounts how the sampling limitations of the E-Mu SP-1200 (a workhorse among the first generation of studio beatmakers, like Pete Rock) forced him to chop up beats out of necessity, forging the methodology of his trademark early production style, where discrete drum beats might be nabbed from entirely different records.

But in the segment titled "Hip Hop Today: Under Construction," the titans are philosophical as well, allowing that new technologies (such as the widely available '80s gear by Japanese companies like Roland and Akai) gave them their entry into the business. For a new generation of beat stylists, it's still about the spirit of invention, the thrill of transcending material limitations: not so much what you're working with, but what you do with it.